In his Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech to the Swedish Academy on December 7, 2005 playwright Harold Pinter spoke of Art, Truth, and Politics. (You can read the text of his speech or watch it here. I strongly recommend watching it. My previous comments on the speech can be found here and here.)

In the political part of his speech, Pinter does a clinical analysis of the lies that propelled the US into attacking Iraq and then shows how it fits into a long historical pattern. He talks about many things that will be strange, especially to younger people in the US, because this kind of historical analysis is very rarely seen in the media here. And yet history is the only way that we can make sense of events, so Pinter’s speech fills an important void. He says:

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America’s favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as ‘low intensity conflict’. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued – or beaten to death – the same thing – and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America’s view of its role in the world, both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: ‘But in this case “innocent people” were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?’

Seitz was imperturbable. ‘I don’t agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,’ he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: ‘The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.’

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren’t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about ‘a tapestry of lies’ which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a ‘totalitarian dungeon’. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. ‘Democracy’ had prevailed.

But this ‘policy’ was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

I have little to add to this. Pinter reminds us that the only gift that a writer has to offer is to speak the truth as he or she sees it, however uncomfortable it may be to the listener. Most people in the US will be horrified by what he says because they do not realize the extent to which the governments they elect carry out policies that they would oppose if they knew what it really was, instead of the way it is presented to them by the government and relayed to them by an uncritical media. Such people, if they are skeptical, should look at the historical record and see if it bears out Pinter’s charges. Willful ignorance about the facts of history only further guarantees that history will be repeated.

In his Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech to the Swedish Academy on December 7, 2005 playwright Harold Pinter spoke of Art, Truth, and Politics. (You can read the text of his speech or watch it here. I strongly recommend watching it.)

He says:

In 1958 I wrote the following:

‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.
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But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.
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Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
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A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection – unless you lie – in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

Reading and listening to Pinter’s words, I was wondering if what he said about the relationship of art to truth applies to science and truth too. At first blush, it seems no. We tend to believe that science can tell the difference between what is real and what is unreal, between what is true and what is false.

But a close examination of the nature of scientific development says that it is not so easy. While science is evolving and becoming more effective and successful in controlling the environment, its relationship to truth is also ‘forever elusive.’ We march forward but we are not sure if truth is the reward that awaits us at the end or indeed if there is an end at all. But like the artist, we cannot stop in the search for truth. (These ideas are explored in depth in my first book Quest for Truth: Scientific Progress and Religious Beliefs.)

In Pinter’s words about political language, I hear echoes of some things George Orwell said in his essay Politics and the English Language. But whereas Orwell became somewhat compromised later in life, becoming effectively a propagandist for the British government and even becoming an informant to the British government on ‘crypto-communists,’ Pinter’s vision and burning desire to speak truth to power seems to becoming even purer and more uncompromising with advancing age. It is clear that he is a man who does not care what powerful people think of him. He is going to speak the truth, come what may. In the end, that is the only real gift a writer has to offer.

The great American journalist I. F. Stone recognized that speaking truth to power means that you become a pariah in the circles of power and he said that journalists should desire this. Stone said:

To be a pariah is to be left alone to see things your own way, as truthfully as you can. Not because you’re brighter than anybody else is – or your own truth so valuable. But because, like a painter or a writer or an artist, all you have to contribute is the purification of your own vision, and add that to the sum total of other visions. To be regarded as nonrespectable, to be a pariah, to be an outsider, this is really the way to do it. To sit in your tub and not want anything. As soon as you want something, they’ve got you!

This explains a lot about the pusillanimity of the current crop of big media journalists who, unlike Stone, crave access to the political powerful and want to be invited to their parties. Pinter, on the other hand, is clearly someone who also thinks the label of pariah is a badge of honor. I am not sure if Pinter and Stone were friends, but it is hard to imagine them not hitting it off.

In regions of conflict, such as Iraq, we cannot depend only on the US media for accurate information. Very often, they are either pursuing their own agenda and/or are easily manipulated and intimidated by the US government. Some of the best sources of news are from the world media and humanitarian groups like the ICRC, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, Voices in the Wilderness, plus some groups that are religiously based. Although the people in these groups are disadvantaged by not being trained reporters, they have a huge advantage in that often they are in the very thick of things, have first hand knowledge of events, and most importantly, are not dependent of developing a cozy relationship with the US military and government which, as recent developments in the Valerie Plame case involving Judith Miller and Bob Woodward have shown, has corrupted journalism to an immense degree. (More about this in a future posting.)
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The way that the media and the big powers react to event like those that took place in Rwanda were also well described I the film Hotel Rwanda. (See yesterday’s posting.)

As long as there were still western tourists and workers and missionaries still in Rwanda, there was some interest and media coverage. News crews were present and western governments sent in troops to make sure that those people got out safely. But once that happens, and westerners are no longer in danger, it is in the interests of the big powers that events like what happened in Rwanda quickly fade from the media screens. And it should be clear to any political observer that the US government is very adept at controlling which events receive high profile media coverage and which don’t.

In the film, the hotel manager who is the hero of the film tells the TV reporter who captured images of the slaughter that he is glad that he has done so and that when people in the west see the carnage they will demand action. But the reporter has to disillusion him, saying that people will simply say “how dreadful” and go back to eating their dinner. It is not that people don’t care, and some people care deeply enough to try to get action taken to solve the problem. But whether actions are taken by governments depends on more than human needs.

Most ordinary people in any country have genuine humane impulses that recoil from gross injustice, and if the events in Rwanda had received sustained media coverage, then there would have been demands that concrete action be taken, either unilaterally by countries that have the ability to do so (like the US) or through multilateral agencies like the UN. But the western powers have little or no interest in countries like Rwanda. It has no strategic, military, or economic value. So once the westerners and the media had been evacuated, it is easy for these governments to ensure that the subject more-or-less disappears from the radar screens of the west. This is done by responding to specific questions on the situation by saying that you regret what is happening, appealing for peace, saying that you are monitoring developments closely, referring the question to the UN, and ensuring that nothing gets done there beyond the passing of some resolutions. After awhile this kind of coverage gets ‘boring’ and the media attention shifts elsewhere.

This was what happened during the Clinton administration, who was president during the Rwandan crisis. Reports are now emerging that the Clinton administration was fully aware of the scale of the atrocities that were taking place in Rwanda in 1994 but pretended ignorance, carefully avoided public use of the word ‘genocide’, and buried the information in order to justify its inaction. The news report quotes a Human Rights Watch spokesperson who says “They feared this word [genocide] would generate public opinion which would demand some sort of action and they didn’t want to act. It was a very pragmatic determination.” And even now, you will find more coverage in the world press than in the US of this news of willful inaction, because the major US media never likes to admit how it is complicit in aiding the agenda of the US government.

Contrast this with what happens when the US government really wants something done, as was the case in Iraq before the invasion in 2003. Then the members of the administration talk about it day in and day out in every possible forum, playing up every atrocity in Iraq as a reason for immediate action. How many times have we heard about Hussein gassing his own people as one of the many, and shifting justifications for the attack? And recall that even this event, talked about repeatedly just prior to the war, actually occurred in 1988, when it was not news here. This was because Hussein was an ally of the US at that time and this kind of embarrassing fact had to be suppressed. The event only became newsworthy when it served an administration purpose.

Or take another classic example. Arguably one of the biggest mass murderers of the second half of the twentieth century was President Suharto of Indonesia. The slaughter he unleashed against his opponents in the late 1960s after taking becoming president of that country was incredibly brutal and widespread, with estimated dead between 500,000 and one million. And then later he invaded and annexed East Timor (which had gained independence from Portugal in 1975) with US government approval and slaughtered many people there too. But it is a safe bet that most people in the US have neither heard of him or the events I am referring to. In fact, during all these events, Suharto would come to the US and be treated deferentially as an honored guest. Why is this? Because Suharto was a good and faithful ally and it was inconvenient to have him brought to justice for his crimes. But how was attention to be diverted from his actions? To see how the US government can control how foreign leaders are portrayed in the US media, compare the way that Cambodia’s Pol Pot and Suharto were portrayed. Edward Herman (who is professor emeritus at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania) has a comparative analysis that is a must read.

Stephen Zunes, professor of Politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco in his article US Double Standards in the October 22, 2002 issue of The Nation magazine shows how the US government managed to prevent any multilateral action against Suharto. He says:

For example, in 1975, after Morocco’s invasion of Western Sahara and Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, the Security Council passed a series of resolutions demanding immediate withdrawal. However, then-US ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan bragged that “the Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. The task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.”

Whether the UN acts or not is determined by what the US government wants in terms of its own geopolitical interests. The UN is still useful as a forum for exposing some things that might otherwise be hidden, so it serves some purposes, but we cannot expect it to act on purely humanitarian grounds, however deserving they may be. Once we understand that, we can get to grips with the question of why events like Rwanda in the mid 1990s and Darfur, Sudan now can occur, and the world simply averts its eyes.

We cannot depend on the media, especially commercial media, alone to focus attention for a long time on these situations. We also need other independent organizations, such as NGOs and humanitarian and religious groups, but such actions carry their own dangers, as we will see tomorrow.

POST SCRIPT: Unbelieving defenders of the faith

James Wolcott points out and comments on an interesting discussion going on in the National Review Online that illustrates how many self-professed ‘defenders of religion’ and supporters of so-called intelligent design creationism are themselves unbelievers but think that religion is useful for keeping in order what they perceive as the lower intellectual classes, those ‘beneath’ them.